William HarrelEpson Expression ET-2700 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank PrinterThe Epson Expression ET-2700 All-in-One Supertank Printer may lack a few features for the price, but it prints well and with low running costs.

The Epson Expression ET-2700 All-in-One Supertank Printer may lack a few features for the price, but it prints well and with low running costs.

Aside from its ability to hold thousands of pages worth of inexpensive-per-page ink, at its core, the $279.99 Expression ET-2700 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer is a very basic all-in-one (AIO) inkjet printer. The ET-2700 brings a few sorely needed upgrades from its previous version, the Expression ET-2600—including, for instance, the ability to print borderless snapshots. Otherwise, this new model is much like the one that came before it. If you need to print a few hundred pages each month, and don't require a lot of frills, like, say, a color touch screen and two-sided printing, the ET-2700 churns out terrific-looking pages and photos at some of the lowest running costs you'll find.

Small Stature, Short on Features

Part of a seven-machine debut of EcoTank all-in-ones, the ET-2700 is one very inexpensive ($20) rung below the ET-2750, and the two printers are quite similar. What you give up for not very much money is a color graphics display, and, as mentioned, automatic two-sided (auto-duplex) printing. (That last one, auto-duplexing, should be a given on a $280 AIO.)

Brother, too, recently introduced an entry-level version to its stable of reduced-ink-cost AIOs, the INKvestment line. INKvestment AIOs are different from both Epson's and Canon's bulk-ink models in that, instead of built-in reservoirs filled with ink, INKvestment AIOs deploy relatively high-yield ink cartridges with much lower than usual running costs.

Measuring 10.2 by 14.8 by 22.3 inches (HWD) with its trays open and weighing a slight 11 pounds, the ET-2700 should fit comfortably on most desktops. The ET-2700 is similar in size to the Canon Pixma G2200 MegaTank All-in-One Printer, but that Canon model is about 3.5 pounds heavier. The Pixma G3200 MegaTank AIO is close to the same size and weight as the Epson.

The ET-2700's paper handling consists of one 100-sheet tray that extends up and outward at the back of the printer. The tray can also be configured to hold up to 10 No. 10 envelopes or 20 sheets of photo paper. That's the same as its ET-2750 sibling, as well as Canon's Pixma G3200 MegaTank AIO. (Both machines also have the same list price.) Brother's INKvestment MFC-J775DW model's paper input tray holds only 100 sheets, too, but it also comes with an automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending multipage documents to the scanner

Remember that, like the ET-2600, the ET-2700's control panel comes without a color screen, one of very few in Epson's vast stable of printers without one. In fact, it has no screen at all. Instead, its control panel consists of a handful of buttons—power, Wi-Fi, Network Status, B&W Copy, Color Copy, and Stop, or Cancel—and six status LEDs: Power On/Off, Wi-Fi Direct On/Off, Check Ink, and Check Paper.

Epson takes some of the sting out of the ET-2700's high price tag by adding a second year to the one-year/50,000-pages standard warranty when you register the product. In other words, sending in or completing the registration online doubles the coverage to 24 months/100,000 pages—a lot of pages for this compact little printer. The ET-2700 does not come with an ADF.

Making Connections and Setting Up

The Epson ET-2700's connectivity features consist of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and connecting to a single PC via USB. Other mobile connectivity options include Epson iPrint App (iOS and Android) and Fire OS printing.

Compared with previous EcoTank AIOs, setting up the ET-2700, especially filling the ink reservoirs, is easy. With this line of printers, Epson has remade not only the ink bottles themselves, but also the reservoirs in which you pour the inks. Both containers, for instance, come with leak-proof plastic fixtures that allow you to upend the bottles and pour the ink without squeezing, and the bottles sit upside-down, unattended, until the reservoir is full. Removing the bottles without dripping ink out on to your printer or desktop is just as easy. As bulk-ink printers go, Epson's EcoTank line ships with a superior, no-mess ink refill system. The whole setup process is quick and easy.

Print Speed Is Not Everything

Epson rates the ET-2700 at 10.5 pages per minute (ppm), which hinges on rock-bottom for a desktop AIO machine. I've reviewed slower-rated inkjet desktops, but not slower by much. All of Canon's G-Series EcoTank models, for example, are rated at 8.8ppm, which is gruelingly slow. Also, like many of these lower-end bulk-ink models, such as the Canon G2200 and its siblings, which printed our 12-page monochrome Microsoft Word test at about 8ppm, the ET-2700 fell short of its volume ratings during our tests.

The Canon Pixma G2200 managed only 7.1ppm on this part of our test regimen, as did the G2100. And Brother's MFC-J775DW (rated at 12ppm) churned at the rate of 10ppm. For the next part of our tests, I combined the results from the previous 12-page text document test with those from printing our full-color Acrobat, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing photos and graphics, to come up with a representative speed for printing our entire 26-page suite of test documents. Here, the ET-2700 managed only 4.9ppm, which may sound slow, but it's in line with many of the other smaller bulk-ink machines. The MFC-J775DW, for instance, eked out only 4.6ppm, and all four of Canon's MegaTank machines were, at about 3ppm, even slower.

Finally, the ET-2700 printed our two high-quality 4-by-6-inch snapshots at an average of 12 seconds each, which was a few seconds faster than Canon's MegaTank printers, and quite similar in speed to most other entry-level EcoTank models.

Terrific Print and Copy Quality

One of the advantages of both the EcoTank and MegaTank AIOs is that, as long as you throw quality content at them, they'll deliver quality output back to you. As mentioned, a drawback to the ET-2700's predecessor, the ET-2600, is that it can't print borderless documents, even photos. In "borderless" photos, of course, the content runs off of (or "bleeds") the edge of the paper, giving them a higher-quality, more professional-looking finish; borderless printing also looks good on specific brochures.

The good news is that the ET-2700 has been upgraded (from its predecessor) to allow you to print borderless photos, but only up to 4-by-6 inches in size. All other sizes, photos or otherwise, still require about an eighth- to a quarter-inch boarder around them, which is faster to produce and uses less ink, but is often not as attractive.

Otherwise, the ET-2700's output quality is quite good, with well-shaped, easy-to-read text down to about 7 points, or so, making it suitable for most business applications (except where fast, high-volume Excel charts and PowerPoint handouts are required). Business graphic pages are good-looking, with vibrant, accurate colors and impressive detail, making them more than suitable for most professional scenarios.

Taming the Ink Cost Beast

The essential question prospective buyers of the Epson Expression ET-2700 EcoTank All-in-One Printer should ask themselves is: do I or my small enterprise print enough to justify the price of this printer? As I said earlier, if you print more than about 200-to-300 pages each month, why not? After the initial investment of $250 for the printer itself, the individual ink bottles deliver running costs of about 0.03 cent for monochrome pages, and 1.1 cents for color pages. If, however, you buy Epson's Multi-Color Ink Cartridge Pack, you get the three color ink bottles for a few dollars less than when you buy them separately. This drops the color cost per page to just less than 1 cent per page.

The Canon G-Series MegaTank AIOs' ongoing per-page costs (such as those of the G3200's) are about 0.3 cent for monochrome pages and slightly less than 1 cent for color pages. Brother's INKvestment MFC-J775DW, at 1 cent for black pages and 4.7 cents for color pages, is one of the least-expensive-to-use cartridge-based AIOs I know of, especially for monochrome pages.

When comparing these running costs to those of a non-bulk-ink model, such as Epson's own Expression Home XP-440, the differences between them are quite significant. The XP-440's running costs are, for instance, 5 cents more than those of the ET-2700, and about 12 cents more per color page. Depending on how much you print, that difference can result in a meaningful savings after even just a few months.

High-Quality, Low-Cost, Low-Volume Printing

Given that you could—with a high-enough print volume, that is—literally recoup the additional cost of this printer's purchase price by saving on the ongoing price for ink in just two or three months seems like reason enough to take the Epson EcoTank ET-2700 home. It prints well, if not slowly, and this year's version supports borderless snapshot printing on 4-by-6-inch pages. Canon's MegaTank printers, on the other hand, can print several borderless pages sizes up to letter-size. Overall, the ET-2700 is a fine printer, but, given that for $20 more the ET-2750 provides automatic two-sided printing and a color screen in its control panel, I really can't justify recommending the ET-2700 over the ET-2750. Either feature is well worth $20.

About the Author

William Harrel is a contributing editor focusing on printer and scanner technology and reviews. He has been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. He has authored or coauthored 20 books—including titles in the popular "Bible," "Secrets," and "For Dummies" series—on digital design and desktop publishing softw... See Full Bio

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